Saints Row 3’s Expansion Is Evolving Into Saints Row 4

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Times are hard at THQ, despite their releasing a ton of good games of late. The publisher is strapped for cash, and it just keeps getting worse, most recently its shareholders launching a class action suit over the disaster of their U-Draw flop. Whether that’s a factor in today’s announcement, that Saints Row: The Third stand alone expansion ‘Enter The Dominatrix’ is now to be integrated into the fourth game, we’ve no idea. But that’s what’s happening, according to THQ boss, Jason Rubin.

What was originally intended to be a significant expansion pack for last year’s absolutely fantastic Saints Row: The Third, is now to be a significant proportion of the game’s fourth edition. This came about, Eurogamer reports, after Rubin noticed quite how good the ideas in Enter The Dominatrix were.

“When I looked at the Enter The Dominatrix expansion in production at Volition, I was blown away by the ideas and desire to expand the fiction of the franchise. I asked the team what it could achieve given more time, more resources, and a broader scope for the project. We all agreed we wanted to play that game.”

It’s interesting, as you can bet your bum Volition would have already had plans in mind for SR4 – it’s a series they’re fascinated with seeing how far they can take, what extremes are possible while still maintaining something that works as a narrative game. SR3’s Dominatrix was surely something completely separate, but now is to be the core of the fourth title, apparently due to be released some time next year.

Speculating, you can see how using something that’s already significantly in development will speed up the appearance of a much-needed sequel for THQ’s out-turned pockets. But of course it also means the loss in revenue that would have come from both being bought. So I dunno. Maybe it is just as they say it is: they liked their expansion so much they figured it should be reworked into a game of its own?

58 Comments

I fucking love Volition because of Summoner and obviously, Freespace. I figure they wanted to release the 4th earlier or they thought the new expansion was adding so much to 3rd that they would have to come up with a lot more new stuff to make the sequel different enough.

I think this is a good thing. Waiting to make Saints Row 4 on the next-gen consoles would take much longer and alienate anyone who won’t be upgraded in time. Getting it on current systems as part of the last series of games before the new consoles means they’ll still have a big customer base. If it’s a success, we can expect SR5 on the PS4 and Xbox 720.

This is unfortunate insofar as it’s basically announcing the fourth game will be conservative. This was an expansion; if it really forms the core of the fourth, that means it will have roughly the same mechanics, structure, graphics engine, etc. Doesn’t meant it will be bad, of course.

Yeah, pretty much this. I’m a little worried for the quality of the game, since THQ are obviously strapped for cash and will need some quick money, thus not putting enough into the development of the game.

But it really isn’t a crime that expansion is now a sequel, since it was supposed to be a standalone expansion anyway.

Saints Row 3 felt the same as 2 except with a bizarre difficulty curve, some badly tacked on mini games, and nothing to unlock. I hated it, probably even more than 1 and 2. I can’t see Saints Row 4 being able to be any worse.

I loved the unlock system in SR3. If you saw some cool new toy in a cutscene, you were all but guaranteed to be getting your hands on it in the immediate future. That’s perfect design, as far as I’m concerned.

Rather disappointing. I think Saints Row 2 was a fantastic game. The story and characters were pretty well in sync with the often insane setting, and the humor was occasionally really great. By turing the silliness up to 11 on Saints Row 3, I think they lost a bit of what made Saints Row 2 such a well-balanced game. Now they`re turning it up to… 12? Where can the series go from there except down?

Oh, sure. But they said a while ago they had a clear vision for how SR4 would be, back when SR3 was just released IIRC. Which, well, I imagine to mean they already were working on it. SR3’s selection of clothes and weapons was, to be frank, a bit underwhelming, so I was hoping an expansion would be a good excuse for adding more of both, and allow me to keep all the old stuff (which would be a grand total of two games’ worth in one game – would be neat, yes?) :)

Not really, following internet logics, if you get DLC you must ask for expansions/new games and if you get new games/expansion then you must ask for DLC

so…
OMGZ VOLITION/THQ WHY NOT JUST GIVE US OVERPRICED DLC I BEG YOU

On a serious note, I think its good news, it might mean that SR4 wont be a revolution, but at the moment I feel the concepts from SR3 but more polished, expanded and improved, are very good for a sequel, so its fine

The guy wants it to have the same scope and production values as RDR and Skyrim. I don’t think something that has “Enter The Dominatrix” in the title will ever have the same _tone_ as those games, if that’s what you’re concerned about.

Expansion packs are a staple of gaming; even if they are now called “DLC”.

Thing is, with DLC we have seen expansion backs diminish in scope. Expansion packs used to be -expansive- but DLC rarely is. I was kinda looking forward to what looked like the first properly large-sized expansion pack for some time. Shame.

Shareholders seem to be the stupidest, most entitled people on earth. I heard a radio discussion with some idiot sobbing about all her life savings being gone because of the shares she bought in some company (or bank) that went bust. Guess what, if you don’t earn it directly yourself you can’t complain when the speculating you decided to indulge in doesn’t go your way. Gambling, which is essentially what owning shares is, is your own risk. You can’t put money on horses and then sue when your horse doesn’t win.

“I wanted money for nothing and then it didn’t work out now I’m upset about it.”

I think he means “we can sell more of Saints Row 4 than we can of Saints Row 3 and a bit” doesn’t he? His comments about respecting that people want bigger, louder, faster more OTT stuff seems to imply that anyway.

Hm, strange, I would have assumed releasing it as an expansion would have meant: Faster release and faster cash…. Well do me a favor and get rid of the stupid region lock in SR4. I would have loved to buy Saints Row 3 but then I would have only gotten a censored game which can only connect to people playing the same censored version in coop. Real deal breaker.

As sadistic as this sounds, I won’t shed a tear when THQ finally go bankrupt. They’ve turned their most popular IPs into nothing but glorified DLC marketplaces, they bum-rushed Homefront’s dev team and used them as sacrificial lambs after the backlash against the game, and the last good thing they put out was Metro 2033.

Saint’s Row The Third is a bloated overwrought mess, even more so with every dinky little DLC pack they charge their customers for. It really gets my goat when people continue to buy this crap.

Sad to see THQ starting to tank, hopefully Saints Row 4 will save them, that or Company of Heroes 2. To be quite honest they seem to be one of the few large conglomerates to give liberties to their devs and not milking the hell out of games (See Activision and Call of Duty). Even with disasters like Red Faction Armageddon (Shiver), though I did like Homefront multiplayer quite a bit, was a welcome change from Battlefield and Call of Duty, the singleplayer was wayyyy too short though. Anyways, compared to the huge conglomerates like Activision-Blizzard, EA, and Ubisoft; they seem to be willing to stay away from the DLC rip off model. All in all, it would be very disappointing to see a rather good publisher to die away.

I think you’re confusing THQ with some other, more worthy, game publisher. A few points:

* Homefront’s devs were creatively shackled by THQ while making that game, and they were quickly let go even after Homefront proved itself to be a money maker for the company. That’s not how pubs should treat their dev teams.
*THQ are surely milking the hell out of their Warhammer and Saints Row IPs. They release redundant, pricey and shallow DLC packs. They completely abandoned Dawn of War II in favor of an exploitative DLC scheme for Retribution. They held back content from both vanilla versions of Space Marine and SR3 and now release said material as DLC.

While I don’t think that THQ are anywhere near the same level of douchebaggery as ActiBlizz or EA, They are certainly guilty of implementing some of the same dubious business decisions as other companies.

At the very least, they aren’t shoving DRM down our throats (cough, cough, Ubisoft). Not to mention, while they surely are milking the Dawn of War series, the games have more or less changed in many ways from their predecessors (That is the large expansions and base games).

Hang on, assuming the directors/CEO of the company aren’t living the high life and inappropriately milking the company dry for their own personal gratification, how can you blast them for both heading for bankruptcy AND being greedy? Surely attempting to maximise profit in the face of financial difficulties would be sensible* and responsible?

Greed and mismanagement are in no way related concepts. I agree totally that THQ has mismanaged (U-Draw was a terrible idea and they are paying for it now) but there is pretty much 0 proof of greed. And you can’t list DLC or bad ideas as proof of greed, all that is proof of is running a business, which involves profit margins and investors rather liking the idea of getting a return.

The Dominatrix part of three was a virtual world that sort of echoed the real one. My assumption is that they’ve taken it to its natural conclusion: building a virtual world that exists under/behind/inside the entire real open world, that the player can switch in and out of. I bet they were trying to build a virtual version of the world in 3, and the guys saw that, though “hrm, that’s cool” and moved them over to the world they’re building in 4.

It matches what we saw of the world in 3, it explains how they could make it a focus of 4 without interfering with the parts already in development, and it explains how a simple idea (have a virtual component to one part of the world) could stretch into something much larger (build a virtual component behind the entire thing, with its own rules and ties into the story/gameplay).

I agree with you, and to my last posts in here, I guess I was letting my stock control my brain. Sorry bout’ that guys. But still, they are not as bad as the other corporations: EA, Ubisoft, and Activision-Blizzard.

So if GTA is getting progressively more serious and pretentious, and SR is getting progressively more ludicrous and flippant, who’s going to fill the market gap in the middle and make more SR2-ish games? I hope someone does…

Sanits Row 1 showed a ton of promise. Saints Row 2 was awesome and blew the sandbox genre out of the water. It may have been overshadowed by the overhyped GTA4, but it was way better IMO. Saints Row 3 managed to capture some of what was great about 2, but otherwise was a total let-down. It was clearly the result of some major mismanagement and strategy problems with its development. It was basically cobbled together in an unfinished and unintelligible mess. The story was out of order and made no sense, the open-world exploration was white-washed out of existence, and all of the unlockables and power-ups were reduced down to a very primitive menu-driven point system that was tedious and annoying.

There’s a lot of shades of grey to this, I guess if we got to see *all* of what was originally planned for SR4 at some point it wouldn’t matter. As far as the general direction of the series, like a lot of other people I think SR2 had it just right with the balance of serious and silly. But it goes without saying that the fun aspect is the most important thing, regardless of our personal views and preferences.